Britton : Dr. Torrey as a Botanist * 545 



his assistants and successors at Harvard University we are all 

 familiar; the first part of " Synoptical Flora of North America" 

 appeared in 1878, and during twenty -two years a small part of the 

 field has been covered. The work is one of stupendous magni- 

 tude, and the amount of new material yet being collected in nearly 

 all parts of the country still pours in, placing the present endeavor 

 in much the same difficult position as the one faced by Torrey and 

 Gray in 1843. The extensive studies of the lower plants have 

 brought a new element into the problem, and our territorial exten- 

 sion another one, while still another is apparent in the critical 

 studies of American botanists on the flora of the continent south 

 of the Rio Grande, this latter making it almost necessary that the 

 descriptive botany of Central America should be written by Ameri- 

 can botanists. The systematic North American Botany of the 

 future, may then readily be foreseen to cover the continent in its 

 broadest definition, not excluding the West Indies. How this 

 may be accomplished in a reasonable space of time, is a problem 

 to which the attention of all North American botanists may ad- 

 vantageously be given. 



During the two decades subsequent to 1843, Dr. Torrey's 

 studies were mostly concentrated upon the determination and re- 

 cording of the botanical results of the numerous expeditions sent 

 out to the far West by the United States government, and in this 

 work he was associated with Dr. Gray, Dr. Newberry and others. 

 He worked up the collections of Nicollet, Fremont, Emory, Stans- 

 bury, Marcy, Sitgreaves, Pope, Beckwith, Gunnison, Whipple, 

 Williamson, Parke, and Ives, as well as the enormous collections 

 made by Parry, Wright, Bigelow, and Schott on the survey of the 

 United States and Mexican Boundary. 



Shortly after the publication of the Botany of the Mexican 

 Boundary in 1859, Dr. Torrey transferred his herbarium and botan- 

 ical library to Columbia College, and for the next ten years he was 

 chiefly occupied in herbarium work. A large part of the her- 

 barium was mounted by himself, and his constant observations are 

 recorded in the great number of sketches of floral dissections with 

 which it is enriched ; in fact most of his critical studies on plant 

 morphology are thus recorded by his pencil. He was in this 

 work accurate and painstaking to an astonishing degree; the 



